Additional Sources

Hockenberry, J (2006), Building a Better Battery, Wired, v14 i11 November“… Lithium-ion technology may be approaching its limits. Batteries conform to technical restrictions set by nature and don’t obey Moore’s law like most of the digital world. In the last 150 years, battery performance has improved only about eightfold (or less, depending how it’s measured). The speed and capacity of silicon chips, of course, improves that much every six years. “Li-ion is an extremely mature technology, and all of the problems are known by everybody,” says Art Ramirez, the chief of device physics at Bell Labs. “They aren’t going to change.” [See the chart of performance improvements over time of HDDs vs processors vs Li-Ion Batteries – not quite a technology s-curve,as it doesn’t measure R&D effort, but it has half the picture – the technical performance]

Steve’s digicams site offers a detailed breakdown (often literally) of microdrive storage devices – the 1″ and 0.85″ HDDs. Again, this is useful for identifying key players in the market and some performance criteria.

Other reading

6/10/06 Rebuilding MicrosoftBill Gates is on his way out. Now it’s up to Ray Ozzie to revive the flagging giant – and get it ready for the post-desktop era. [Wired] … Microsoft has been in a funk since 2003. Its travails could be the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on the innovator’s dilemma [Clayton Christensen – see disruptive innovation] . The company made – and still makes – billions selling desktop software, mainly Windows and Office. But the center of gravity has moved, and desktop software is about as cutting-edge as a nightly network newscast. Instead, Web-based apps are taking hold, and devices other than the PC – smartphones, iPods, digicams – represent the growth markets for software. At the same time, new business models, like search-based advertising and low-cost software subscriptions, are beginning to generate big money. [Wired]